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Pedagogy regained : shaping pedagogy and self in autopoietic unity

This thesis is premised on the indivisible unity of pedagogy and self and predicated on researching, in Frederic Jameson’s words, “pedagogy as autoreferentiality”: writing about the practices of pedagogy is writing about the practices of self, and writing about the practices of self is writing about the practices of pedagogy. The writing, it is argued, becomes a reflexive shaping tool which is instrumental in the reconstitution of pedagogic self, and writing of, and from, the self is poiesis and the mode of (re-)production. An ideological infrastructure for an autopoietic construct of pedagogy is contextualised in the systems thinking of Fritjof Capra, and in the ethical and political ecology of postformal critical pedagogy and complex critical ontology reviewed in key texts by Henry Giroux and Joe Kincheloe. The study centres on the recovery of pedagogic selfhood through debating, as Kincheloe espouses, ‘critical’ questions on ethics and aesthetics, morality and politics, emotions and ‘gut feelings’, and these form the structuring themes for a theorisation of autopoietic pedagogy. Using activity theory, this theorisation proposes a working hypothesis of learning as a particular form of human activity in which meta-experience – the experiencing of experience – and identity formation ‘couple’ with the wider structuring forces of social systems. It finds that the normal flow of information intended to produce teacher learning is an insufficient explanation of expert teacher activity and that the ‘retroviral’ notion of i-learning, characterised as instinct, intuition, insight, and accessed through critical introspection, opens up a relatively young and unturned field of educational enquiry dubbed here as autochthonology. The paper argues for autochthonography as a genre of self-expression, combining the elenctic and exegetical, which represents a synthesis of thinking, in the Deweyan sense, as an aesthetic activity and Lebesgue’s practical philosophy of thinking in front of one’s students.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:646861
Date January 2014
CreatorsIngram, Andrew C.
PublisherLondon South Bank University
Source SetsEthos UK
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation

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